That was the first time I tried Linux with the free and open thing. I didn’t know much back then and when I saw the ads, I was like… Ooohhh this is ad supported crap. Nope… Not at all
Fucking distro kept me away from my spirit penguin for 2 years before I realized it was ubuntu’s fault.
That’s a real screenshot?
Yes
Not ads, actual Amazon search results. The good old times when Big Tech wasn’t so radicalizingly big.
This may be kind of a dumb question, but would it affect Mint in any way if Canonical were to reintroduce ads? I know Mint’s a fork but I’m not sure how integrated that part of the OS is.
It wouldn’t be worse than snap integration which Mint already doesn’t use. Also Mint have a backup plan called LMDE if things go sour.
I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint’s main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.
Probably not as the Mint Team would either not be affected or they would have a cow.
When snap came out the Mint team got pissed and started maintaining the packages removed from Ubuntu
They were heavily panned for that back then. My image of Ubuntu of that time is heavily associated with their Unity desktop which they latter dropped(only for it to spring up again).
I still think they should never be able to escape the controversy. It was 10 years ago but the possibly that it could be reintroduced still exists.
They’ve never given me the vibe that that reversal of course was permanent, or that other things they do aren’t similarly anti-user
In many respects, I think the scare manipulation they’re pulling when someone updates their system up try to get them to buy their subscription service is worse, implying that they won’t be getting all of the security patches they need otherwise
Oh no! Another DE to choose from? How awful!
I liked Unity. Like, a lot.
Pepperidge Farm remembers
Yup, that was when I switched off ubuntu to debian
Ads?! in Ubuntu? Never! They were simply “integrating online scope results into the home lens of the dash” 🤡
(that is an actual quote from the sentence immediately following “We’re not putting ads in Ubuntu” in Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post responding to the entirely predictable backlash after they did this, twelve years ago…)
Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.[1] In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first South African to travel to space, doing so as a space tourist.[2][3][4] He lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom.[5][6] According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Shuttleworth is worth an estimated £500 million. –Wikipedia
This explains so much.
He the Linux world’s mini elon musk
I think they were just doing a bit
“the ads are coming from inside the house”Canonical would prob do something like this today like how shove snaps
I don’t. I migrated to Arch in 2011 or 2012 btw. Fuck I feel old.
This shit probably put me off trying out Linux for years.
Hopefully you’ve tried another distro by now, and also know to avoid big corporate distros best you can
Been using Mint for a few years now.
I was digging LMDE until my 8GB of ram simply couldn’t handle the load and I’m in AntiX now. Honestly, I’ve watched Mint go from being immature and insecure to security leaders without losing their accessibility. Solid and incredibly important distro if you ask me
Yeah, me too. I quit X the moment Musk took over.
I quit, told him to go fuck himself, that we see who he really is and to delete my account after he started banning journalists who dared to criticize the “free speech absolutionist” dickhead.
Huh, I was using Ubuntu as my daily driver circa 2014 and I don’t remember this at all… maybe I stopped just prior to them implementing it… or maybe it just didn’t make enough of an impression for me to notice.
It was also fairly easy to disable
Ehh… not at first. That was a later release.
It was just a package you could uninstall.
Yes, and I don’t consider that an “easy to disable” option for regular users, but that’s just my opinion.
“Easy to disable” is also the wrong approach, IMO. It should have been “easy to enable” - stuff like this should always be opt-in, not opt-out. Opt-out, to me, demonstrates a company’s motivations more than anything else.
I chose the hard way to disable it back then, and switched to Debian.
Yup, debian is where I was before Ubuntu, and where I went back to. Still what I run mostly, plus a few different flavors of it (proxmox for example).
Though I’m also running an arch desktop on one of my play machines, kind of reminds me of having to write my x conf out in the 90s! Not bad overall.
(Never giving up my deb stable servers though!)
Ohhh I probably disabled it right away and then forgot about it.
It could have been earlier? i tried Ubuntu around 2012. I didn’t know how to get rid of the Amazon stuff, and it turned me off Linux…thinking why use this OS that is ad based…wasn’t till 2017 when W10 made our computers slow that I tried linux again.
didn’t they also put ads for ubuntu pro in your .bashrc?
That’s still there but it appears when you use apt, it’s not in .bashrc.
I missed all the fun because there was no ads in my country, and the Amazon app was just a weird western thing removed right away. Unity was pretty good though.
I’m pretty sure that Canada is considered west
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t born here, detective.
